John Lennon, New York, 1974 by Bob Gruen. Image via Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
The Immigrants, a new exhibition at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, looks at the immigrant experience from the 1860s to modern day. Focusing on the issues of labor, education, poverty, discrimination, and assimilation, the immigrant’s journey is traced through more than 70 images taken by over 40 photographers, including Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Ruth Orkin, Edward Burtynsky, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange, Augustus Frederick Sherman, Tseng Kwong Chi, and Ernst Haas, among others.
Memorable photographs on display at The Immigrants include Lewis Hine’s Climbing into America (1905), Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907) and W. Eugene Smith’s Dream Street (1955-56). The exhibition also features two historic works by Augustus Frederick Sherman — who documented new arrivals while working as a clerk at the Ellis Island immigration — as well as two of Lange’s rarely seen images, which depict the United States’ incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, photographs which were banned during wartime.
Some of the most moving entries in the exhibition, however, are those in which immigrant subjects told their stories to their photographers; portrait shots by Bill Owens and Dulce Pinzon reveal personal tales of struggle and growth.
A portion of the proceeds from this exhibit will go to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which lends support to refugee families afflicted by conflict and disaster. The Immigrants is open at the Howard Greenberg Gallery (41 East 57th Street) through January 27, 2018.
